No where is the left’s hypocrisy on display more than the 2nd Amendment debate. Check out this Democrat lawmaker:
“As a hunter and gun owner, I will not give up my guns and I will not ask other law-abiding Americans to give up theirs,” says Thompson, 62, a former state legislator and eight-term congressman.
But he wants YOU to give up YOUR guns because “it’s common sense”
“I know a lot of NRA members and I don’t know of any who think they should have the same weapons as the police or military — or should be able to buy a gun without a background check. What we’re hearing from is the real extreme.”
…”I’m a gun guy, but I carried an assault weapon in Vietnam. And if I never see another one, it’ll be too soon,” says the former Army infantryman, who earned a Purple Heart.
Assault weapons “give a bad name to gun owners,” Thompson continues. “There are more people who don’t own guns than do. If they think all of us gun owners are running around with assault weapons, that’s going to do us a real disservice. And we’ll just fall out of favor with the voters.”
He’s a hunter so I’m sure he has one of these:
Which is the same EXACT thing as this gun:
Except for one little thing…it looks ssssccccarrrrry.
And us police and military are the only ones who should be allowed to own scary looking guns.
What a disgrace.
Meanwhile The Hill writes about Obama’s use of executive order to accomplish gun control by fiat.
The executive steps will give federal law enforcement officials access to more data about guns and their owners, help keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill, and lay the groundwork for future legislative efforts.
…A key factor in strengthening the NICS database, they say, is getting states to report more information on mental health and criminal history records.
Earlier this month, the DOJ announced a $20 million grant program aimed at incentivizing states to submit more mental health and criminal history information into the NICS database.
…Also this month, the White House Office of Management and Budget said it would consider changing rules to make it easier for states to share mental health records with the NICS.
JeffG tears apart the article:
…“privacy concerns” here, with respect to the 2nd Amendment, are characterized as a kind of obstacle, a second obstacle being heretofore a lack of bribe money available to “incentivize” states to sell out the privacy of their citizens. King Obama, blessed be He and His Name, has fixed that, however. By executive fiat.
Moreover, the article suggests, the NRA has been standing athwart common-sense anti-privacy measures yelling stop!– and as a result, bad people have done evil things. Liberty being well and truly overrated if what comes along with are concerns over security, particularly, the government being out of every conceivable monitoring loop to protect us from ourselves.
Yet, the reason the NRA and other civil liberties groups don’t want to give the government access to an inventory of our private property, or details of our health — particularly with respect to our weapons — is not, as this article intimates, that they are pro-crazy people with guns, but rather because they know, as do we, the government to be political, and so its aims and motivations and policy are always going to be driven by ideology and expedience, two dangerous threats to rights that are supposedly out of the purview of man, especially once the checks and balances are removed from the equation.
As with “global climate change,” gun control will soon be billed as a matter of medical necessity, and when you live in a system where the government controls health care, your choice may soon be that you can choose between maintaining that “free” universal health care, or surrendering your weapons, which pose a (statistically-manipulated) “outsized danger”. That is, you’ll be free to choose which “right” you value more, the right to your arms or the new “right” to have health care.
Thanks, John Roberts!
Too, what comes to count as mental illness — and a potentiality for violence such that “we” must “act” to “take away the threat” — will be greatly expanded, and will reach into (I predict) such things as prescription drugs, and (as we’ve already seen written about in government documents and studies) the kinds of sociopathology that can be inferred, supposedly, from, say, a distrust of federal government, a desire for limited government, activism within the TEA Party movement, and other markers of potential domestic terrorism.
Professor Edward J. Erler lectured recently about the fact that our founders understood that government is political, as JeffG describes, and it’s political motivations need to be constrained by the people. This is a long piece, and I’m quoting a long portion of it but to cut and clip it would do it disservice:
The Second Amendment reads as follows: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The immediate impetus for the amendment has never been in dispute. Many of the revolutionary generation believed standing armies were dangerous to liberty. Militias made up of citizen-soldiers, they reasoned, were more suitable to the character of republican government. Expressing a widely held view, Elbridge Gerry remarked in the debate over the first militia bill in 1789 that “whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia.”
The Second Amendment is unique among the amendments in the Bill of Rights, in that it contains a preface explaining the reason for the right protected: Militias are necessary for the security of a free state. We cannot read the words “free State” here as a reference to the several states that make up the Union. The frequent use of the phrase “free State” in the founding era makes it abundantly clear that it means a non-tyrannical or non-despotic state. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), rightly remarked that the term and its “close variations” were “terms of art in 18th-century political discourse, meaning a free country or free polity.”
The principal constitutional debate leading up to the Heller decision was about whether the right to “keep and bear arms” was an individual right or a collective right conditioned upon service in the militia. As a general matter, of course, the idea of collective rights was unknown to the Framers of the Constitution—and this consideration alone should have been decisive. We have James Madison’s own testimony that the provisions of the Bill of Rights “relate [first] . . . to private rights.”
The notion of collective rights is wholly the invention of the Progressive founders of the administrative state, who were engaged in a self-conscious effort to supplant the principles of limited government embodied in the Constitution. For these Progressives, what Madison and other Founders called the “rights of human nature” were merely a delusion characteristic of the 18th century. Science, they held, has proven that there is no permanent human nature—that there are only evolving social conditions. As a result, they regarded what the Founders called the “rights of human nature” as an enemy of collective welfare, which should always take precedence over the rights of individuals. For Progressives then and now, the welfare of the people—not liberty—is the primary object of government, and government should always be in the hands of experts. This is the real origin of today’s gun control hysteria—the idea that professional police forces and the military have rendered the armed citizen superfluous; that no individual should be responsible for the defense of himself and his family, but should leave it to the experts. The idea of individual responsibilities, along with that of individual rights, is in fact incompatible with the Progressive vision of the common welfare.
This way of thinking was wholly alien to America’s founding generation, for whom government existed for the purpose of securing individual rights. And it was always understood that a necessary component of every such right was a correspondent responsibility. Madison frequently stated that all “just and free government” is derived from social compact—the idea embodied in the Declaration of Independence, which notes that the “just powers” of government are derived “from the consent of the governed.” Social compact, wrote Madison, “contemplates a certain number of individuals as meeting and agreeing to form one political society, in order that the rights, the safety, and the interests of each may be under the safeguard of the whole.” The rights to be protected by the political society are not created by government—they exist by nature—although governments are necessary to secure them. Thus political society exists to secure the equal protection of the equal rights of all who consent to be governed. This is the original understanding of what we know today as “equal protection of the laws”—the equal protection of equal rights.
Each person who consents to become a member of civil society thus enjoys the equal protection of his own rights, while at the same time incurring the obligation to protect the rights of his fellow citizens. In the first instance, then, the people are a militia, formed for the mutual protection of equal rights. This makes it impossible to mistake both the meaning and the vital importance of the Second Amendment: The whole people are the militia, and disarming the people dissolves their moral and political existence.
The Preamble to the Constitution stipulates that “We the people . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States.” It is important to note that the people establish the Constitution; the Constitution does not establish the people. When, then, did “we the people” become a people? Clearly Americans became a people upon the adoption of its first principles of government in the Declaration of Independence, which describes the people both in their political capacity, as “one people,” and in their moral capacity, as a “good people.” In establishing the Constitution, then, the people executed a second contract, this time with government. In this contract, the people delegate power to the government to be exercised for their benefit. But the Declaration specifies that only the “just powers” are delegated. The government is to be a limited government, confined to the exercise of those powers that are fairly inferred from the specific grant of powers.
Furthermore, the Declaration specifies that when government becomes destructive of the ends for which it is established—the “Safety and Happiness” of the people—then “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” This is what has become known as the right of revolution, an essential ingredient of the social compact and a right which is always reserved to the people. The people can never cede or delegate this ultimate expression of sovereign power. Thus, in a very important sense, the right of revolution (or even its threat) is the right that guarantees every other right. And if the people have this right as an indefeasible aspect of their sovereignty, then, by necessity, the people also have a right to the means to revolution. Only an armed people are a sovereign people, and only an armed people are a free people—the people are indeed a militia.
The Declaration also contains an important prudential lesson with respect to the right to revolution: “Prudence . . . will dictate,” it cautions, “that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” It is only after “a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same Object,” and when that object “evinces a design to reduce [the People] to absolute Despotism,” that “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” Here the Declaration identifies the right of revolution, not only as a right of the people, but as a duty as well—indeed, it is the only duty mentioned in the Declaration.
The prudential lessons of the Declaration are no less important than its assertion of natural rights. The prospect of the dissolution of government is almost too horrible to contemplate, and must be approached with the utmost circumspection. As long as the courts are operating, free and fair elections are proceeding, and the ordinary processes of government hold out the prospect that whatever momentary inconveniences or dislocations the people experience can be corrected, then they do not represent a long train of abuses and usurpations and should be tolerated. But we cannot remind ourselves too often of the oft-repeated refrain of the Founders: Rights and liberties are best secured when there is a “frequent recurrence to first principles.”
The left always mask their restrictions on your freedom by telling us ‘its for your own good’ but their objective is obviously not to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and mental cases. We already have laws against criminals and the mentally ill from owning guns. Why not spend your energy to ensure those laws are actually enforced?
Not so important to them.
What IS important to them is banning scary looking guns…for now, until they go after all the guns:
John Kennedy killed with a 5 shot bolt action rifle.
Officer Tippit killed with a 6 shot revolver.
Charles Whitman, killed 14, wounded 32 others mostly with a bolt action 6mm hunting rifle. Also used a shotgun and an m1 carbine.
Medgar Evers, shot with a 5 shot 1917 bolt action Enfield rifle.
Martin Luther King, shot with a 4 shot Remington 760 pump action Gamemaster rifle.
Bobby Kennedy with a .22 Iver Johnson Cadet revolver.
George Wallace wounded with a 5 shot Charter Arms .38spl revolver.
Howard Johnsons shooter (Mark Essex) killed nine, wounded thirteen with a 4 shot RUGER .44 mag Deerslayer rifle.
Gerald Ford attacked with a 7 shot 1911 semi auto.
Edmond OK post office with two National Guard 7 shot 1911 pistols.
SF mayor Moscone killed with a 6 shot revolver.
John Lennon murdered with a 5 shot Charter Arms revolver.
Ronald Reagan and Jim Brady with an RG-14 .22 revolver.
Ronald Gene Simmons: killed sixteen people. Strangled half his family, shot the other half with a .22 single action six shot revolver.
What do they all have in common? NONE over 7 rounds, yet after each one came a cry of panic to ban all of them.
30 round magazines comes first. Scary looking guns comes first….and then what?
All of them.
Of course they can’t confiscate all of them, unless the government were to become a tyrannical fascist regime at which point this line from the Declaration of Independence becomes even more relevant:
“it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Which is the reason the 2nd Amendment was written in the first place.
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